Okay, Google for Jobs in changing the world!!! We can all lose our minds now and freak out!

You’ve probably already seen a huge shift in your applicant traffic. I’ve spoken to some corporate talent acquisition leaders that are seeing up to a 60% shift in applicant traffic because of Google for Jobs. Most of the traffic loss is coming from Indeed, which makes sense as Indeed jobs are not being “indexed” in Google for Jobs.

Your jobs at Indeed will still show up in Google organic search results, but they will not be seen in Google for Jobs. So, applicants who are using Google for Jobs will find your jobs here, not on Indeed. Across the board, almost every employer will see a change in applicant traffic. Some more drastic than others, and it doesn’t mean Indeed still won’t produce, they will, but we expect it will continue to shrink somewhat over time as more and more candidates just search for jobs on Google for Jobs.

One other major (I mean MAJOR!) issue is at play because of Google. In Google for Jobs’ new ‘job schema‘ (basically, all the structured data you put into your job posting, and how Google ranks one job over another), Google is saying if you want your jobs to rank higher on Google and be more likely to be seen by candidates you now have to put salary on your job postings!

CareerBuilder says almost 80% of the job postings on their site (that’s millions of pieces of data over) DO NOT have a salary listed. This is a major problem for corporate talent acquisition teams. By not putting salary you are drastically hurting your chances of your job being seen on Google, or having your competition’s job being ranked higher than yours if they include a salary or salary range.

The big question is, why are organizations so fearful of putting the salary on their job postings?

Again, CareerBuilder has data that shows those job postings with salary information get far more traffic. Google says the same thing and says it’s one of the primary things candidates want to find on a posting, but corporate talent acquisition isn’t delivering. The data even shows that job postings with under market salaries will get more traffic than a posting with no salary listed.

Here are three reasons you aren’t posting your salaries, but the reality is, the reasons don’t matter because Google is going to make you post them!

1. You are unwilling to have a simple conversation with a candidate who thinks they’re worth $100K, when you only see them as an $80K talent.

2. You are unwilling to fix the pay inequities in your own shop, and showing the salary range you’re hiring new talent in will cause problems.

3. You think people don’t already know what you’re paying, you believe this to be a major negotiating advantage.

The reality is, we, in talent acquisition, are conflict avoidant and we don’t list salaries on job postings because we know doing so will cause some issues we’ll have to deal with. I get it. I’ve lived it. Google does’t care about you. They care about candidates, so you better figure it out before your competition does, or you’ll be at a huge disadvantage when it comes to applicant traffic.

FOT Note: We here at FOT like to think we get talent and HR at a different level. At the very least, we are probably going to have a different take than the norm. So it made perfect sense to ask SmashFly to be an annual sponsor at FOT, where they’ll sponsor posts like this one, allowing FOT contributors to write, without restriction, on all things related to recruitment marketing and how it helps organizations find, attract, engage, nurture and convert talent. Learn how you can proactively protect your organization from the talent crunch by building pipelines of engaged talent in our Talent Pipelines Solution Guide.